BBC Learning English
Words in the News
26
th
August 2011
Earth may house 8.7 million species
Words in the News
© British Broadcasting Corporation 2011
Page 1 of 2
bbclearningenglish.com
A team of scientists has adopted a new approach to estimating the total number of living
species on Earth, and has come up with 8.7 million. Their findings appear in the online
journal, Public Library of Science Biology. BBC’s Paddy Clark reports:
It's generally accepted that very many species have yet to be discovered, but until now nobody
has devised a reliable way to find out just how many. Suggestions for total numbers have
ranged from 3 million to a hundred million, but most of these have been no more than
intelligent guesses.
Scientists from the Census of Marine Life devised a counting method by identifying
numerical patterns linking data on known species. They reckon that there should be about 8.7
million types of living organisms, three-quarters of them animals and the rest plants.
However, since the introduction of the current classification system by Carl Linnaeus in 1758,
only a million and a quarter have been catalogued.
The scientists warn that human activity is hastening extinctions, and they note a touch
wistfully, that many of the hitherto unknown species may vanish before we even know of
their existence.
Paddy Clark, BBC News
